Boris Weisfeiler

Boris Weisfeiler (born 1942 – disappeared 1985) was a Russian-born mathematician who lived in the United States before disappearing in Chile in 1985, at the age of 43. The Chilean military regime alleged that he drowned, but his family believes he was forced to disappear, near Colonia Dignidad, an enclave led by ex-Nazi Paul Schäfer.

Weisfeiler, a Jew, was born in the Soviet Union. He received his Ph.D. in 1970 from the Steklov Institute of Mathematics Leningrad Department, as a student of E. B. Vinberg. In the early 1970s, Weisfeiler was asked to sign a letter against a colleague, and for his refusal was branded "anti-Soviet". Weisfeiler left the USSR in 1975, so that he might freely advance his career and practice his religion. After a brief period under Armand Borel at the Institute for Advanced Study near Princeton University, Weisfeiler became a professor at Penn State University. In 1981, he was naturalized as an American.

Weisfeiler's research spanned twenty years, and he published three dozen research papers during his lifetime. According to his colleague Alexander Lubotzky, Weisfeiler was studying "the more difficult questions" of algebraic groups in "the case when the field is not algebraically closed and the groups do not split or — even worse — are nonisotropic". He is known for the Weisfeiler-Lehman algorithm, the Kac-Weisfeiler conjectures, the Weisfeiler filtration, and work on strong approximation and on finite linear groups.

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